After Trump’s 2016 victory, Dems and their media blamed ‘misinformation’ on Facebook. The resulting censorship wars fundamentally altered the balance of power on social media and the state of conservative media. While some conservative news sites were already dealing with headwinds that may have been inevitable, Facebook ceased to be a viable platform for much of conservative media. There was an explosion of vlogs and podcasts helped by influencers of various degrees of credibility.

If Trump wins again, Musk and Twitter/X will be obvious targets, but there are signs that the establishment will be going another route and targeting podcasts and vlogs. The New York Times story teeing up accusations that YouTube is hosting ‘misinformation’ by top conservative shows is already making waves. The Jeff Bezos op-ed at the Washington Post that set off premature conservative celebrations made no actual commitments but did warn of the dangers of misinformation from vlogs and podcasts.

There are signs that the next wave of purges will be less about X (which they can only do so much about anyway) and vlogs and podcasts which, especially when hosted on low-hanging fruit like Google’s YouTube, that are highly vulnerable. Dems see them as the new ‘talk radio’ but much more vulnerable because of the small number of platforms compared to the AM band.

This isn’t so much of a pre-election move as a potential post-election one. Stay ‘tuned’.